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Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Reflections on Taiwan's Democracy During the Ma Ying-jeou Era

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In January 2016, voters in Taiwan went to the polls to select a new president and legislature, bringing to a close President Ma Ying-jeou’s second and final term in office. This roundtable, held at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Seattle, Washington, brings together four specialists on Taiwanese politics to reflect on the legacy of the last eight years of rule by the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), and to consider the challenges facing the new DPP administration of Tsai Ing-wen, which takes office in May 2016. 


The roundtable panel will consider questions about five key developments under President Ma. First, on cross-Strait relations: what has been the political impact of the wide array of agreements that Taipei signed with the PRC, and is this period of enhanced cooperation likely to be sustained by his successor? Second, on the economy: Taiwan’s economy has become increasingly integrated with that of mainland China. What are the long-term political consequences of this trend? Does the next administration have any feasible alternatives to continued dependence on the PRC market? Third, on social changes: wealth inequality has risen significantly under President Ma. Why, and with what consequences for Taiwan’s social compact? Fourth, on social movements: social activism has surged during the Ma era, most notably during the student protests that came to be called the Sunflower Movement. What are the root causes of this increase in social movement activity, and what are likely to be the lasting consequences for Taiwan’s democracy? And finally, on democratic governance: the Ma administration to a surprising degree struggled to pass reforms and to respond effectively to social demands despite holding a large KMT majority in the legislature. Is this worrisome? Does it indicate a general decline in the Taiwanese political system’s ability to govern, or is it something more specific to the Ma administration?  

In considering these questions, the panelists will contribute to the debate about both the state of Taiwan’s democracy and Ma Ying-jeou’s legacy as president.

This special event at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. 

 

Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, WA

Larry Diamond Senior Fellow Chair Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Yun Fan Associate Professor of Sociology Panelist National Taiwan University
Szu-Yin Ho Professor of International Relations Panelist Tamkang University
Shelley Rigger Professor of Political Science Panelist Davidson College
Yun-han Chu Professor of Political Science Panelist National Taiwan University
Panel Discussions

Fieldwork Fail: FSI Faculty Share Lessons Learned the Hard Way

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"What do I do about the chickens?"

When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.

But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.

"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.

Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.

Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."

Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.

The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.

 

 

 

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Authoritarian Responsiveness: Evidence from China

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A growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes are responsive to societal actors, but we know little about the sources and limitations of authoritarian responsiveness because of the challenges of measurement and causal identification. This seminar will focus on the results of two new studies---a survey experiment among 1,377 provincial and city-level leaders in China and an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties---to examine factors that influence officials’ incentives to respond to citizens in the absence of electoral competition. These studies show that the threat of collective action causes county governments to be considerably more responsive, and to be more publicly responsive. However, the manifestation of collective action and social contention decreases officials' willingness to be receptive to societal input. Together these results demonstrate that bottom-up societal pressure is a possible source of authoritarian responsiveness, but one with substantial restrictions.

 

Speaker Bio:

 
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Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the strategies authoritarian regimes employ to perpetuate their rule, including censorship, redistribution, and responsiveness, and how technology facilitates and hinders these strategies. Her work focuses primarily on China, and uses computational and experimental methods to measure and examine different components of these strategies.
Jennifer Pan Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science at Stanford University
Seminars

Running Candidates after Using Violence?

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Designing peace agreements that can be signed and sustained can be difficult in civil conflict. A recent transformation in successful settlement design has produced many cases that include electoral or other political participation provisions. In this paper, we examine popular support for the transformation from bullets to ballots, testing whether individuals object to providing former rebels with the protections and legitimacy of electoral participation. Using a survey experiment in the context of Colombia’s current peace process between the Government and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), we find that the latter is a highly controversial actor in the country—indeed, invoking the specific group diminishes support for the peace process, particularly accords that would allow for increased representation in municipalities more affected by conflict. These findings are important to understanding how to design settlements, providing policy implications for the peace process with the FARC in Colombia but also in other civil conflicts that negotiators may seek to end through electoral participation by the former rebels, a proposal that has become common in many cases, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Aila M. Matanock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and, during 2015-2016, a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her research focuses on post-conflict elections that are produced by peace processes, foreign intervention that occurs by host state invitation, and armed actor governance and social support, especially in counterinsurgency contexts. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, the Pacific, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her dissertation won the 2012 Helen Dwight Reid Award from the American Political Science Association, and a revised version is currently under review as a book manuscript. She has worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation afterward. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.

Aila M. Matanock Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley
Seminars

Between Cyclops and Leviathan: Violence, Order, and Legitimacy at the Urban Margins

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Ongoing crises of urban insecurity in Central America have spurred novel forms of state engagement in high-risk neighbourhoods. In 2012, the Guatemalan government deployed new urban security task forces in some of the capital’s most notorious ‘red zones’, the poor neighbourhoods where gangs, violence, and delinquency are seen to be concentrated. While officials trumpeted their success in pacifying these sectors, their gangs (maras) continued to operate much as they previously had under the new military occupations.

Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in one red zone neighbourhood, this paper examines both gang violence and state power from the perspective of residents struggling to secure a measure of order in a dangerous and volatile environment. I argue that situations of chronic urban insecurity can create opportunities for the state to tighten its relationship with marginal communities, but that they do so in a way that may raise further impediments to substantively improving democratic governance.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Katherine Saunders-Hastings is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She employs ethnographic methods to study the impact of violence and insecurity on the social and political life of vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, focusing particularly on the changing gang cultures and criminal economies of Central America. Katherine earned her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015 and also holds degrees from McGill University and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Clarendon Fund, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. She has worked with the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime (Montreal, Canada) and the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales (Guatemala City, Guatemala).

Postdoctoral Fellow, CDDRL
Seminars

Mass Popular Protests: Challenges for the International Response

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Abstract:

The recent rise in mass popular protests – many with regional spillover effects and some with far-reaching consequences for international peace and security –  has raised the question of how the international community should respond to these events, and to what end. For the United Nations, the question becomes acute in protest situations in which there is a tangible risk of large-scale violence and human rights violations. Yet mounting a rapid and effective response is a particular challenge in these contexts.  Drawing on case studies, practitioner interviews, and the author’s UN experience, this presentation will examine five variables that are critical to success: timing, access, leverage, the ability to propose solutions for non-violent change, and finding the right mix of principle and pragmatism. It will argue that these variables are not static, but dynamic and inter-independent. Getting them ‘right’ in an unfolding crisis is difficult, but it is possible to draw some preliminary lessons from the cases reviewed.

 

Speaker Bio:

alexandra pichler fong
Alexandra Pichler Fong is visiting CDDRL on leave from the United Nations, where she headed the Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political Affairs in New York.  Her work focuses on cross-cutting peace and security issues, such as conflict prevention, preventive diplomacy and peacemaking, as well as policy matters pertaining to UN peace operations in a rapidly changing international security environment. She recently completed an assignment reporting to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for West Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal, to advance the implementation of the UN’s regional strategy for the Sahel. She joined the UN in 2002 as political affairs officer and has served as adviser in the cabinet of three successive Under-Secretaries-General for Political Affairs, focusing on the regions of Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific as well as thematic issues such as UN reform.  Before entering the UN, Alexandra worked at the International Crisis Group; a European network of development NGOs; and the European Commission. She holds a B.A. Hons. degree in Modern History and Literature from Oxford University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

 

Visiting Scholar at CDDRL
Seminars

Election Integrity and the Responsiveness of Politicians

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Abstract:

Do cleaner elections lead to more responsive politicians? In many developing countries, domestic and international organizations take various initiatives to make elections cleaner. These efforts are anchored in the hope that cleaner elections will strengthen the control that citizens have over their elected representatives and ensure that politicians are responsive to their constituents’ desires. Scholars are, however, yet to show empirically that election quality positively affects the behavior of politicians. I provide a novel experimental approach to test the impact of cleaner elections on the responsiveness of Members of Parliament (MPs) in Ghana, a consolidating democracy in West Africa. Preliminary results show that MPs elected in cleaner elections provide more local public goods and constituency services but do not perform any better in their parliamentary attendance.

 

Speaker Bio:

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George Ofosu is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL at Stanford. He is also a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. George specializes in Comparative Politics and Political Methodology. His research focuses on electoral fraud, the effects of domestic election monitoring, electoral accountability, research design, and the political economy of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ofosu's dissertation interrogates the impact of democratic elections on the responsiveness of politicians in developing countries, focusing on the case of Ghana's Members of Parliament. His dissertation has received funding from UCLA's International Institute.

Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL, Stanford
Seminars
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